Introducing Edify Huddle

At Enterprise Connect, many of us got a peak at the newest customer experience player, Edify and its Business Communications as a Service (BCaaS) platform. At Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, Edify announced general availability of its cloud-native platform called Edify Huddle, which brings together CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS.

As I noted in a previous article, according to Cameron Weeks, Edify co-founder, the company set out to create what it considers the first truly completely integrated business communications platform, integrating contact center, UC, and collaboration in one platform from Day 1, and all built on top of Edify’s CPaaS platform. The Edify platform combines contact center, UC, team collaboration, and PBX functionality with AI and machine learning capabilities, featuring Edify’s intelligent conversation routing engine named Hammond. While it can serve smaller and larger organizations, Edify’s target market sweet spot is 50-2,000 users.

Since the initial announcement there’ve been several changes, including the branding of the service. Now called Edify Huddle, offerings include:

Huddle ML: Cloud native omnichannel business communications, with Machine Learning for $7 per user per day

Huddle: Cloud native omnichannel business communications for $6 per user per day

Edify tries to make it easy for organizations to try out the service by making the first five users free forever. It also offers a 100% SLA and will pay back 10 times what the customer pays to Edify if there’s an outage or if the service goes fully offline.

Total Solution

What’s different about Edify is that it combines contact center, UC, collaboration, and PBX functionality providing a single tool with a single dashboard from a single vendor. It offers AI and machine learning capabilities, featuring Edify’s intelligent conversation routing engine named Hammond.

For years we’ve had siloed applications – voice/telephony, contact center, collaboration – making it challenging to unite internal employee-facing and external customer-facing communications. There’ve been many efforts to bring together unified communications with contact center capabilities to enable “expert agent” capabilities whereby contact center agents can interact with subject matter experts in the organization to help resolve a customer’s issue. By having all employees, including contact center agents, knowledge workers, front line workers, etc. all on the same platform, customer issues can be resolved more quickly.

With Edify Huddle, customers, agents, and subject matter experts can collaborate seamlessly, while communicating and interacting in the channel that is most convenient or useful. By unifying workforces on a common platform, users can transition seamlessly between communication touch points, mediums, and methods, giving customers more control and continuity. This helps to ensure customers get what they need across all channels in the sales and service cycle. The company emphasizes its ability to make frictionless transfer possible, improving both the user and agent experience.

Edify also provides AI capabilities based on Hammond, the Edify Huddle AI engine. As an intelligent conversation routing engine, Hammond can link to knowledge bases and provide information to agents to help them better engage with customers.

Edify is trying to be disruptive, and one way of doing this is by removing or lowering barriers to entry. By providing the first five user licenses free forever, Edify is encouraging companies to try out the service and get their feet wet. Organizations can easily pilot a group in an office, department, or region to try out the service and then grow as needed.

There’s a lot of competition in the business communication and customer experience space, and Edify is up against a lot of well-known and well-financed players. Now that the company has launched its flagship product, we’ll have to see how well they deliver and support customers. After all, it’s all about the customer experience.